J. Mitchell - Midnight City

It yanked them straight upward, left them floating in midair, weightless, feet off the floor, spinning around helplessly. In shock, Holt tried to reach a wall or the ceiling or anything to give him traction, but they were all too far away. He was stuck, hovering uselessly in space over the crumbling bathroom floor.

Max spun around as well. The difference was, he seemed to be having a great time. The dog barked excitedly as he rotated and twisted, enjoying the weightlessness.

The girl laughed, watching them. “Well, at least one of you’s enjoying it.” She moved to her clothes, slowly gathered them up, and put them on.

The girl was thin and lithe, with short red hair that ebbed and flowed somewhere around her neck line. Her eyes, just as Holt guessed, were green, and they shone like emeralds behind the black of the Tone. She had the easy body language of someone capable, like most survivors these days. The ones who couldn’t save themselves had long ago been weeded out, but there was more to her than just that. A polished savviness and lighthearted glint in her eyes that was earned only from numerous close calls and brushes with death.

Holt caught only glimpses of her as he spun, brief flashes of golden wet skin in the lantern light. Any other time, it might have been a nice sight.

“Let me down!” he demanded, managing to twist around enough to aim the shotgun at her. She just laughed, watching him with amusement. Holt felt a rush of anger, both at his predicament and at being bested by a girl. “I don’t want to, but if you make me shoot, I will!”

He had underestimated her, he knew. Big-time. And he wondered how many others had made the same mistake.

The girl clicked her tongue disapprovingly. “Shooting a gun inside a gravity void’s the opposite of a smart idea,” she replied, calmly tying her shoes. “And Midnight City wants me alive. There’s no reward for you if you shoot. And that means you won’t.”

The girl grabbed an overstuffed backpack from the floor and opened the bathroom window, letting the cold night air float in. She put one foot through… then paused, looking back at him.

“My name’s Mira, by the way. Mira Toombs,” she said, smiling as she stepped all the way through the window. “Did you think I wouldn’t make you work for it?”

Holt could only watch as she dropped from the windowsill. He heard her hit the ground below and scamper quickly away, leaving him stranded in midair.

He cursed as he floated. A Strange Lands artifact. It must have been. The wanted poster had clearly said she was a Freebooter after all, an expert. He should have seen it coming. But he hadn’t. And now he was trapped while all that reward money ran away from him.

But he wasn’t going to lose it this easily.

Holt studied the room, noticed objects at the other end weren’t floating as he and Max were. Whatever she had done to the gravity, she had done it only in close proximity to the two of them. It meant the “gravity void,” or whatever she called it, didn’t extend that far out. If he could just reach its edge…

But he couldn’t grab a wall or the ceiling, couldn’t grab anything to pull himself through the air. There was one thing, however, he could reach.

Max yelped as Holt grabbed him. “Hold on, pal.” Holt flung Max forward. The dog flew over the floor with relish, then passed through the edge of the void and back into normal gravity.

He fell to the floor with a thump, and Holt quickly grabbed a spool of rope from his belt and tossed an end of it to Max. Half of it fell to the floor in front of the dog as it passed through the edge of the zero-gravity. The rest still hovered weightless above.

“Pull!” Holt shouted. Max grabbed the rope and started pulling, growling with enthusiasm.

Holt held on, being towed through the air. When he reached the edge of the void and passed through, he suddenly realized something. “Wait!” he shouted at Max, but it was too late. Gravity caught him and he dropped directly into the bathtub.

Water sprayed everywhere, blowing suds and bubbles all over the room. Holt, wet and angry, burst from the tub and immediately leapt through the window.

He landed on the ground outside, looking for signs of the girl. He was in time to see her disappear into the trees a hundred yards ahead. Max landed on the ground next to him, and Holt clicked his tongue twice. The dog darted after her, barking furiously, a missile over the ground. Holt ran after him, watched Max disappear into the tree line.

Holt rushed into the forest, dodging the hulking shadows of huge pine trees in the dark. Only the moonlight filtering in from above gave him light. Ahead, he could hear Max’s barking, and he followed it as fast as he could.

When he burst through a mass of shrubs, he skidded to a stop right before careening off the edge of a steep cliff.

Only open air lay between him and a riverbank hundreds of feet below, and he stared down at it with alarm. Max was to his left, barking furiously. The girl was there, too, keeping the dog at bay with a tree branch.

Holt and the girl locked eyes. She smiled as she saw how drenched he was. “Guess you took a bath, too.”

Then she simply turned… and leapt straight off the edge of the cliff.

Holt gasped; Max barked in frustration. They both looked out over the drop-off, expecting to see her splattered on the rocks below. Instead, they saw something completely different. Mira floated gracefully through the air, light as a feather, like she was being carried by an invisible parachute.

Another artifact, Holt thought with disdain.

Maxed whined pitifully, barked once, desperate to pursue, but without a way to do so. Holt watched the figure of Mira Toombs land on the riverbank and run toward the north. He stared after her, counting each footfall until she disappeared, becoming one more shadow among thousands in the dark.

He had to admit, she was good. No wonder her bounty was so high. But she was worth it, regardless. That reward was salvation, his ticket to the east, away from all his problems, and he didn’t mind putting in a little overtime to get it.

MIRA TOOMBS STARED NERVOUSLY at the huge, imposing structure across the lake.

In the World Before, it was called Clinton Station, a nuclear power plant built on the banks of Lake Clinton in Illinois, known for its bright blue domes and cooling towers. Now it was a crumbling, overgrown ruin. The towers still retained a little of their former color, but one of them had collapsed and the other was leaning badly. Holes where the facility had cratered in on itself were visible in all the surface buildings that still stood.

But it wasn’t the place’s disrepair that made Mira uneasy, or even the very real possibility of radiation. It was the fact that behind her, the sun was setting, a giant sphere that buried itself in the horizon and colored the water of the lake orange.

Normally it would be pretty, but right now it simply meant that night was falling. And that what lived inside the old power plant would very soon be awake.

Mira tried not to think about it. She had no choice, after all. She had to go inside, had to find what she had come all this way for. It wasn’t just her own life she was trying to set right, she reminded herself.

From nowhere, a blast of sound filled Mira’s mind.

It was like static, like the sound from a mistuned radio projected at full volume. The shock caused her knees to buckle, and she barely caught herself from falling when it hit.

It lasted only a moment… then receded back where it came from, to the edge of her awareness. It was still there, as always, the hissing pulse of static she could hear in the back of her mind. The ever-present effect of the Tone, the Assembly’s little gift to mankind.